A booking is a real chunk of work — one of your team, heading to one of your projects, on a specific day. It's the unit the whole schedule is built on.
There are two natural places to create a booking — inside the project itself, or directly from the Calendar. The form is the same either way; only what's pre-filled differs.
🎥 Watch the walkthrough:
The quickest route
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Open the project from Projects in the sidebar.
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Click the Booking button in the top-right of the Bookings tab.
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Fill in the form.
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Hit Create Booking.
Because you opened the form from inside a project, Xota's already filled in the client and project for you — nice shortcut.
The booking form
Draft toggle
Top-right of the form you'll see a Draft toggle. Flip it on to stage a booking when you know work's coming but don't have a firm date yet — useful for speculative or pencilled-in jobs. Draft bookings don't need a date and don't show up on the live calendar until you commit them.
Leave it off for normal scheduling.
Name and description
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Name — something scannable on the calendar, e.g. "Strip out ground floor".
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Description — the detail. What's being done, any specifics the operative needs to know when they show up on site.
Date
Defaults to today. For anything scheduled ahead, pick the day it's happening.
Timed vs untimed
A key decision. Every booking needs a duration, but how you specify it is up to you:
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Untimed (the default) — just set a Time (minutes) value and the booking flexes through the day.
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Timed — flip the toggle and set a specific Start Time and End Time. Use this when the team has to be on site at a particular hour, when the job has a hard finish time, or when you want the operative to clock in and out.
Untimed is the right default for most field work; switch to Timed when precision matters.
Team member(s)
Pick who's doing the work. You can select more than one, and Xota will create a separate booking for each — handy when you're sending a two-person crew.
Create
Hit Create Booking and the card lands on the project's Bookings tab and on the Calendar at the same time.
Creating from the Calendar instead
Open Schedule from the sidebar. Hover any empty cell and an Add button appears — click it to open the same flow with the date and team member pre-filled from the cell you clicked. Same form, same result, just a different entry point.
The booking lifecycle
Every booking moves through four statuses:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Staged but not on the live calendar yet. Optional starting point. |
| Active | Scheduled and ready — the default when you create a booking. |
| Complete | The operative has marked it done from their phone after finishing on site. |
| Signed off | You or the client are happy with the job — closed out, filed away. |
Sign-off is also where photos of the finished work and a client signature get captured. The operative does that from the mobile view, and it all hangs off the booking so you've got a full audit trail. The operative and client experiences each have their own dedicated guides.
Three views, one booking
The same booking data lives in three places:
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On the project's Bookings tab — filtered to just that project.
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On the All Bookings list under Schedule — every booking in your account, in one table you can sort and search.
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On the Calendar — the visual week-at-a-glance view that most schedulers use day-to-day.
Same booking, three different ways to look at it.
Next up
Head to Using the schedule to see how to manage bookings at scale once you've got a few of them running.